FutureStructure - A New Framework For Communities

This summer we launched a new project at e.Republic called FutureStructure. It's a shared initiative between our Governing, Government Technology and Emergency Management media platforms and is focused on helping public officials and other interested folks drive innovation and better thinking around making great places to live in a true 360% sense. I'll be posting more on our FutureStructure initiative, but for now a short video introducing the project. 

Policies, Politics, and the Human Dynamics of Government & Technology

I was interviewed recently by Alexandra Meis, cofounder of the education startup Kinvolved and a graduate student at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. I met Alex last year when she and the Kinvolved team won the National Invitational Public Policy Challenge hosted by the Fels Institute of Government and Governing. Both Kinvolved and Alex are doing great work, some of which you can follow here. The interview was for her class Gov 3.0: Rethinking Governance and Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century. Here's an excerpt:

Alexandra Meis: Beth Noveck’s Gov 3.0 class at NYU Wagner is focused on the notion that “technology has the potential to transform governance and produce a more open and participatory political culture with effective institutions that engender trust.” What are your thoughts on this? What, in your opinion, are the biggest changes with technology over the past 3-4 years? What will technology with regard to governance look like over the next 3 years? [In general?]

Dennis McKenna:  Certainly the movement to make government more open and transparent has been important and leaders like Beth (Noveck) and Aneesh (Chopra), have been pioneers in this and have done great work.

You see a great deal of activity today with organizations like Code for America and hackathons hosted by cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia that are changing the culture of how governments engage with the public and in their use of technology. This is a significant shift. Certainly many leading political campaigns, whether for candidates or on issues, have become effective in building what might be called a more participatory political culture. Most of this innovation has been around the edges, however, and there remains a long way to go.

I’d like to mention something here. There are of course many factors that influence the current state of our political culture and Americans’ relationship with governments at all levels. One that is critical but overlooked is cultural and has little to do with technology but the two intersect.

Governments, taking a cue from private industry and the consumer movement in general have for decades increasingly approached their populations as “customers” or “clients” of public sector services.  In fact, “customer service” has become as important a term of art for public organizations as for private companies. Admirably, governments are harnessing smart technology to improve the “customer service experience”. Getting people “on line and not in line” as they say.  This is well and good and certainly routine services are a significant part of what governments do and technology innovation can be applied here.

What gets lost, however, is the notion of citizen. I have a colleague that likes to say that government is a barn raising and not a vending machine. Governments struggle with the problem of public engagement. I would argue that this arises, in part, from this diminished idea of “citizen” in our current government/public equation.

This is terribly oversimplified, but for example, in education we know that better outcomes come from ecosystems that engage parents, kids, and the broader community. If parents simply take the view that “I’m a client of a school and my kid is a consumer of the education system,” we can run into problems. A better approach is “I’m a citizen engaged in my child’s schooling and school.”  This is a more fundamental idea: “I participate” vs. “I consume” government services. Surprisingly, back in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy In America called this participation out as a unique strength of the American people.

So social media and related technologies can improve trust issues and open up government data. But through all this it’s important to drive the notion that we’re all in this together.

The Mile Markers Keep Whizzing Past

Those of us in the business don't need reminders, but the disruption of the media industry by digital technology rolls on unabated even after a decade or more of churn. And the rate of change just keeps accelerating as legacy media firms remain in a perpetual struggle to keep their footing.

So just for the record, a couple more mile markers whizzed by this week:

Online streaming will surpass DVD's in movie consumption this year, but like the print vs. web advertising shift, at much smaller revenues.

Bloomberg's BusinessWeek reported on March 21st that Apple's iPad outsold Hewlett-Packard PC's in the fourth quarter of 2011. HP is the world's number one maker of Wintel PCs and BusinessWeek notes that if you consider the iPad a PC subsitute then "Apple...is the biggest PC maker in the world."

And while these latest developments are not immediately related to the graph below, the broader wake of this creative destruction certainly tells stories like those cited by Derek Thompson recently in The Atlantic. (As tough as these revenue numbers are the circulation figures are equally gruesome as Thompson notes.)

The Week: Back to the Future

Amidst the news of the NY Times latest “pay-per-view” scheme the same paper ran a fascinating piece on an upstart newsweekly called The Week that’s meeting surprising, if modest success at a time when periodicals and certainly general newsweeklies are in steep decline.

If you haven’t seen a copy, The Week is a tightly edited digest of what happened in the world the preceding week. It covers hard news, politics, culture and more; mostly by citing, mashing-up, and sometimes excerpting content from other sources. While their model works better in print than online, here’s an example of what they do: What happens if a Japan-sized earthquake hits California?, or this on business news: Is Groupon really worth $25 billion?

Intriguing about The Week is that it is in many ways a reprise of the publishing strategy envisioned by Henry Luce and his original partner Briton Haden for Time magazine in 1923. A story well told in The Publisher by Alan Brinkley.

As access to news and information explode The Week is finding, as Time did in its day, that readers value both the utility and art that sharp editors bring to netting out the stuff they’re interested in.

Governing Magazine Takes 1st at Neal Awards

Was very proud to receive word that Governing magazine took 1st place at the 57^th Annual Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Awards competition, in the “Best Single Article” category.

The article receiving recognition is an excellent feature by Governing senior editor Zach Patton and tells a clear, straightforward story about Colorado Springs, Colorado and what happens to a local government when driven by an ailing economy and tax adverse voters to do “less with less”. Published last September it’s a prescient piece now being played out by increasing numbers of states and localities throughout the country. It’s also a great example of the kind of reporting that Governing’s talented writers and editors consistently turn out.

e.Republic Moving to Cloud Based Technologies

The July/August cover story of Folio magazine is about the increasing use of cloud based technologies in the publishing field and does a good job outlining various steps we have taken at e.Republic to move to an entire set of "Software as a Service" (SaaS) type applications for much of our technology infrastructure.

In this day and age a publishing firm's technology platform is a central to its overall business strategy and while any technology solution has tradeoffs we've been pleased with how this deployment has worked for us since we began this overhaul of our tech platforms two years ago.

The products we use include Clickability for content management, Eloqua for marketing automation and Salesforce for a whole range of apps including sales and customer relationship management as well subscription and event registration management.

The Folio article details some of the tangible benefits we've seen from this migration. Bottom line, it has allowed us to focus on using our technology to effectively meet business objectives as opposed to supporting an increasingly expanding IT shop.

Technology Giveth, Taketh and Perhaps Giveth Again?

This week Apple’s IPad goes on sale and it got me thinking back to the debut of the original Macintosh computer in January 1984. I can’t remember what teams played in the Superbowl that year but I vividly recall the jaw dropping “1984” Apple ad that aired early in the game. At the time I was in the startup days of a small publishing firm. We were producing regional magazines the old fashion way with clunky typesetting machines, hot wax, pica poles and Xacto knives. Apple’s new computer got my attention.

It took a few years but before long the Macintosh revolutionized our company and the entire publishing industry, drastically driving down production costs and exponentially increasing creative capacity. The Mac ushered in something close to a renaissance in publishing and I don’t think firms like mine would have been able to grow and thrive without the revolutionary technologies that eventually came out of that new machine.

Well technology has no emotional attachments and hasn’t been kind to the publishing world in the last decade. Some debate if the newspaper or magazine will even survive.

In this context the release of the IPad and the next generation of tablet devices is a big deal. While it’s too early to say for sure, my bet is that devices like the IPad and the new software and apps they’ll usher in are laying the foundation for the next renaissance in publishing.

To get a sense of this check out this recent item from Paid Content that does of quick round up of 15 publishers and how they are re-thinking the magazine. Very cool stuff; especially the clips from Wired and Sports Illustrated.